Daniel Saldaña París - Among Strange Victims

“Everything all right, young man?” he asks. I know it’s a rhetorical question, that he couldn’t, in fact, give a fuck whether or not everything is all right; he just wants to chat for a while or show me he’s doing his job properly. The double standards of security guards: they want you to know they have power, but they can’t suppress that sense of inferiority, that inevitably servile attitude against which their spirits struggle, with high-handedness being the outcome of that struggle.

He introduces himself as Jacinto Nogales Pedrosa (“at your service,” he adds). I introduce myself as Rodrigo Saldívar, honoring my elusive dad and the — also elusive — truth. He tells me there have been “incidents” in the area during the last few nights and that I should be careful. He’s a good sort, I think. Though I understand why Marcelo might warn me about him: his personality is ambiguous, maybe too ambiguous for an outsider to understand. Even for me, his ambiguity is disturbing. Only provincial people can tolerate such a high dose of ambiguity without feeling themselves in the presence of the unspeakable.

We chat for a while. His speech alternates with pauses so long that at times I believe our conversation is definitively over. But he goes on. And he goes on saying things that don’t necessarily have anything to do with what we’re talking about, or don’t have anything to do with it at first, though later it seems they do, but only in a tangential, elusive, unexpected way. He asks me, for example, about the phone I’m holding, about the brand, its quality, and so on. I briefly explain it’s a simple cell phone with good reception. We say nothing for quite a while, and when he speaks again it is to describe his wife. He tells me she’s good-looking, with a beauty spot on her face. He tells me she’s a mute, a deaf-mute. Then he talks about his children, who are not deaf-mutes, and finally he returns to the topic of the phone, of how he lost his — the reason: he never used it because his wife is a deaf-mute. Stories that bite their tails, or at least chase their own shadows. Bite their own shadows.

Jacinto continues on his rounds, and I go back inside the house. Why don’t I call Cecilia? Maybe she fell asleep before the time we had tacitly agreed on. Or had gone to see her parents and would return later. Or she had to stay a couple of hours late in the museum due to some sudden whim of Ms. Watkins. I’ll call her tomorrow, I think. And I think that I like talking to her, even if we have little to say to each other. Even if we only talk about Ms. Watkins, and the damp, and how I’m doing with my nonexistent task. At least she’s not a deaf-mute.

16

Discovering conversation, the possibility of a real exchange, is a rare event. In general, we proceed without bothering about what those around us understand or fail to understand, and have recourse to language for simply practical matters, to come to an agreement. Conversation, in contrast, forms the basis of a dialect as it unfolds. Conversationalists weave a language of their own, constructed from winks and inferences and keywords, in which words don’t mean what they mean, or always mean a little more than they mean, in a warped, unpredictable way. In the context of complicity, conversations proliferate like climbing plants covering the castle of language, reinvigorating it, negating the aridity of the brutal stone. The layers of conversation are multiple. It often happens that a word stops meaning the thing enunciated and begins to mean another word that in turn can indicate another, and in this way, ad infinitum, the words in the conversation refer to themselves and multiply like a hen in a hall of mirrors.

Marcelo sits down in the opposite armchair and tells me my mother is worried about me. Not only because I haven’t submissively become a member of the academic community, a topic she is completely incapable of dropping, but also because she suspects I’m going mad. Marcelo says my mother says that I said something very strange to her about poo when she called the other day at seven in the morning and woke me from a deep sleep. I laugh.

“I might have,” I say, “but at that hour, we’re all mental cases. What’s odd is that I never said anything about shit on any one of the thousands of days she woke me up for school.”

Marcelo laughs. He tells me that when he was a child, he was sent to a camp in Extremadura every summer, a camp run by nuns on a high yellowish plain, with temperatures reaching 140 degrees Fahrenheit, where they supposedly taught the children to speak English. One year, he had to share a bunk with a boy around fourteen years old, from Galicia, who walked and talked in his sleep. Marcelo had the top bunk and the boy was in the bottom one, so the Galician’s soliloquies ascended during the night and filtered through Marcelo’s mattress, keeping him awake. Unable to sleep, Marcelo decided to note down the things his bunkmate said. He tells me he still has those childhood scribblings. He has them in a very handsome notebook with a black cover, a brand you can no longer get in Madrid. (Marcelo digresses here; I force him to return to the anecdote.) Mostly the Galician boy sleep-talked about shit (that’s why he recalled the event). In an anguished voice, he said things like, “No, that shit’s not mine, honest!” And then he also talked a lot about cars: he recited the makes and models of the cars of the day, listed their characteristics, criticized their weak points. Marcelo’s anecdote once again faded into unedifying details, and I stopped paying attention. I was left with the first part: a sleepwalker who talks about shit. A sleepwalker who dissociates himself from his shit. He must have been someone like that person who came into my bedroom in DF and shat on the tiger-striped bedspread.

Marcelo suggests that I come back with him for dinner. He says that my mom — Adela — has arranged to go to a party teeming with resentful female academics, and he’s decided to do his own thing. He invites me to this thing. I accept.

1

Marcelo Valente walked to his car under the unforgiving sun, wading through the cloud of scalding hot, yellow dust raised by the vehicles leaving the university in single file. The professor squinted to prevent being blinded by the dry earth. This being the case, he had difficulty finding the right key for the car. He coughed. In a low voice, employing Castilian idiomatic expressions, he cursed the arid environment and that fine desert dust that floated in the air throughout the University of Los Girasoles, covering the papers on his desk and drying his skin. He finally managed to locate the lock and speedily got into the car, slamming the door behind him before the cloud of dust could enter.

He had arranged to meet Velásquez in a restaurant in the center. It was Friday and no one had to go back to the university in the afternoon, so it would be a long lunch, washed down, no doubt, by plenty of tequila. Velásquez wanted to introduce him to a friend of his, a gringo practitioner of the plastic arts who had set up his ceramic sculpture workshop in an old, half-ruined house in the center of Los Girasoles, and had, in Velásquez’s words, “an absolutely visionary artistic project.”